Let's be clear about this: high level languages like python and ruby in production use are doing server side web operations, most of which aren't even very inte

Let's be clear about this: high level languages like python and ruby in production use are doing server side web operations, most of which aren't even very intensive - the assertion that this is being offloaded to the user is false. Anything that a low level language would replace is server side. A Java web app still needs to serve the same javascript that a Ruby or Python app does. Javascript is used client side, and again, it's quite fast, with performance comparable to Java and C++ in most use cases. And a web app is basically never going to reach the cpu/gpu levels that even the lightest game coded in C++ will reach, with rare exceptions.